Photographs & Prints

Our extensive visual collections include photographs, lithographs, engravings, and advertising trade cards and posters.

Special Collections & Archives has more than 32,000 photographs, daguerreotypes, and stereographs of factories, manufacturing techniques, business leaders, and people at work in industrial settings ranging from automobile plants to paper mills. The photographs document American industry and business operations across the United States and in Central and South America, Europe, Africa, and Asia, from 1855 to the 1970s.

These collections exemplify American industrial photography from the 1920s to the 1950s, a critical period in the development of industrial and commercial photography. The holdings described here are discrete collections exclusively containing photographs. Various manuscript collections also include significant photographic materials as part of the overall collection; the Harvard Business School Archives contains a rich collection of approximately 7,800 photographs that document most aspects of the School’s history, curriculum, programs, and campus life, and include HBS faculty portraits by Yousuf Karsh.

The collection also includes American and European prints representing various printing processes, such as woodcuts, engravings, etchings, lithographs, and chromolithographs from the 16th century to the 20th century. In addition to prints, the collection consists of other examples of printed visual works, such as trade cards, posters, and paper currency.

Many of the photographs and prints have been digitized and are available in HOLLIS Images, Harvard Library's dedicated image catalog.

Highlights

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